A Sweeping History of American Comics – The New York Times

AMERICAN COMICS
A History
By Jeremy Dauber

For every Superman, there must be a Superduperman. In 1953, 15 years following the Man of Steel’s first tall-building leap, Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood satirized the hero — giving him the alter ego Clark Bent, who worked at the Daily Dirt newspaper — for the fourth issue of a new humor comic called Mad. Superduperman was a “product of ’50s neuroses,” Jeremy Dauber writes in “American Comics,” an entertaining and richly detailed new history of comics. “Sex and capital are behind comics, ‘Superduperman’ suggests, not virtue or grand ideals. … But Mad elevated such parody to a way of life.”

As in his previous “Jewish Comedy: A Serious History,” Dauber, who teaches a course on graphic novels at Columbia University, has written a scholarly survey that is both opinionated and frequently funny. He starts things off with the 19th-century cartoonist Thomas Nast, who popularized Santa Claus and Uncle Sam on his way to deploying his “Tammany Tiger” to take down Boss Tweed’s political machine. From there Dauber traces the turn-of-the-century explosion of newspaper comics, the advent of comic books, underground comics, fan culture, and finally graphic novels and web comics.

The book is most fun when Dauber turns up what Greil Marcus called history’s “lipstick traces,” illuminating the hidden sources of modern culture. He traces the influences of both Jewish and hot rod magazines on underground comics, and finds unexpected early examples of autobiographical works in the form, including the 1931 “Four Students Comic,” about Japanese immigrant students. Despite his book’s title, Dauber also pays close attention to non-American traditions such as the French and Belgian bande dessinée and especially Japanese manga, the extraordinarily popular genre that would go on to influence American artists from Frank Miller to Art Spiegelman. (In the 1970s Spiegelman read Keiji Nakazawa’s stunning manga series “Barefoot Gen,” about the atomic bombing of Nakazawa’s hometown, Hiroshima; in 1980, Spiegelman changed comics history with the debut of his landmark “Maus,” which likewise explored historical trauma through intimate autobiography.)